Lacey Lockington is a private investigator.
As the three-book series opens, he is a cop and a darn good one. He might be a tad too good, though, at finding dangerous situations and he has had to remove permanently several miscreants who wanted to remove him first. Normally in Chicago this would go largely unnoticed but the publisher of a local newspaper, behind in the subscriptions, opted to take an anti-police stance to drum up controversy and sell papers. He chose as one of his targets the actions of Lockington and he used as his weapon a column by a woman who tried her best to make him out to be a kill-crazy cop. Eventually it would become untenable for Lockington to stay on the job and he had to find another profession.
That new profession was working with his former partner who had left the force years before to become a private investigator. Lockington got his own license and started his new life. In this new job his world remained fairly similar to what it had been before, just without the badge and the protection it brought. He still found himself in trouble a lot where a quick fist or a loud gun could mean the difference between showing up for work again the next day or showing up nowhere ever again.
And this new life brought him just as many opportunities with the ladies, if not more so. And the ladies was something Lockington never had trouble finding. Or wooing. Or winning. Sometimes he had trouble with them staying longer than he would like and sometimes they came back and sometimes they were not so friendly but by and large his problems with women was, well, truth be told, he had no trouble to speak of.
His trouble came in the form of danger in the cases he finds after he leaves the force for the two books that take place with him as a full-time private eye sees him going up against a large number of spies, many of whom would not hestitate to kill him. These spies work on both sides of the Iron Curtain being from both the CIA and the Soviet Union. They either want to have what he has or to make sure he does not have it anymore or to make sure he does not live much anymore. Lockington, though, has his own attitudes.
Sharing a smaller role in the series but proving to be a delight is the Russian spy named Natasha. All moose-and-squirrel jokes aside, that is her name and she is a delight that definitely delights Lockington on more than one occasion.